Sick leave rivals readying for expensive ballot battle

The price to win over voters in the expected fight over a statewide sick-leave mandate could top $10 million this fall, doubling what was spent two years ago when Ohioans voted for an increase in the minimum wage.

"It will easily be a $7 million to $10 million campaign," said Milenthal Group CEO David Milenthal, who has worked on ballot issues in Ohio for 30 years. "The challenge now is to raise the money to sell the issue to voters."

Business groups opposing the sick-leave mandate believe it will take $4 million to $6 million to deliver their message to voters, said Tom Pitrone, chairman of the Ohio Small Business Council, a division of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.

Organizers of the sick-leave ballot bid expect to be outspent by business interests, but political experts think proponents will be able to draw cash from large labor unions, including the Service Employee International Union and Ohio Education Association.

"It's a little bit of a classic business-versus-labor showdown," said Hicks Partners CEO Brian Hicks, who has worked on about a dozen issue campaigns in Ohio and was chief of staff in Gov. Bob Taft's administration.

Each side will need big money, Hicks said, to cut through the advertising clutter to be generated by this fall's presidential race and campaigns for Ohio attorney general and seats in Congress and Ohio General Assembly.

Back and forth

The first step for sick-leave plan supporters, however, is to get the proposal on the Nov. 4 ballot. Ohioans for Healthy Families, the coalition leading the ballot drive, is collecting signatures to do just that. The signatures of 120,683 registered voters are needed to get the plan on the ballot.

Even issue foes concede the signature drive should succeed, given that Ohioans for Healthy Families collected well more than 120,000 signatures last year to take its proposal to the General Assembly.

The coalition of labor, church, community, health-care and family groups hoped state lawmakers would pass a sick-leave bill, but the Republican-controlled legislature never took up the proposal, leaving the issue for voters to decide.

The proposal would create a law that requires employers with 25 or more workers to provide seven days of paid sick leave annually for employees working 30 hours or more a week. There would also be prorated paid sick leave for part-time workers.

Sick leave could be used for a physical or mental illness, doctors appointments and care of children, parents or spouse with a medical need.

Ohioans for Healthy Families cites government findings that show 2.2 million Ohio workers are unable to take a paid sick day when they are ill. That hurts workers, families, communities and businesses, said Dale Butland, communications director for the coalition.

"We'll be pretty straightforward in terms of our message," he said. "Everybody gets sick and nobody should lose their job or pay because he, she or a family member gets sick. This is the right thing to do."

Ohio would become the first state with such a mandate. That is prompting sick-leave law opponents to claim it will drive up the cost of doing business and hurt Ohio as it competes to retain or attract expanding businesses.

"Like one guy told me, 'It makes Ohio like California only with crappy weather," said Pitrone, a Cleveland-area financial planner who works with small and midsize companies.

Butland said sick-leave proponents will counter that argument with studies showing paid sick-leave benefits boost productivity. Such policies reduce the spread of illness in the workplace, he said, and help ill employees get back to work quicker.

Opponents will also focus on problems they claim the plan would create for employers, Pitrone said. The law would allow workers to take sick leave in increments as small as 15 minutes and only permit employers to require a doctor's note for absences covering more than three consecutive days, he said.

Picking strategies

Focusing on unintended consequences of ballot issues can be an effective defense, Milenthal said. He declined to address the specifics of the sick-leave proposal but talked about ballot issues in general.

"It's easy to show the flaws of an issue, even if it's well intended," Milenthal said. "Almost every issue I've seen is overwritten. They go into such detail that they create their own 'devil in the details.' "

Early public opinion polls on many ballot issues, he said, show voters favor them by wide margins. The margin tends to narrow, he said, as foes chip away at an issue's perceived flaws.

External polls and internal ones conduced by Ohioans for Healthy Families show nearly 75 percent of the public favors the sick-leave proposal, Butland said.

Public opinion polls showed the proposal to raise the minimum wage was favored by 80 percent of Ohioans in June 2006, said Tony Fiore, the Ohio chamber's director of labor and human resources policy. That was when business groups started campaigning against the issue, he said. Four months later, voters approved the ballot issue by a 12 percent margin.

Business groups are getting an earlier start on the sick-leave issue, Fiore said. Efforts are already under way through Ohioans to Protect Jobs, a coalition that includes the Ohio chamber, Ohio Council of Retail Merchants and National Federation of Independent Business/Ohio.

"Who would think this (mandate) is going to create jobs in the state?" he said. "It's going to have the opposite effect."

Sick leave remedy?

Ohioans for Healthy Families is trying to collect enough signatures of registered voters to place a paid sick leave proposal on the Nov. 4 statewide ballot. Here are some of the highlights of the proposed law:? Requires employers with 25 or more workers to provide seven days of paid sick leave annually for employees working 30 hours or more a week. Prorated paid sick leave must be available for employees working less than 30 hours a week or less than 1,560 hours a year.? Does not require employers to grant sick leave during the first 90 days of a worker's employment.? For periods of sick leave less than a normal workday, leave would be calculated on an hourly basis or the smallest increment used by the employer's payroll system to calculate other types of leave.? Sick leave could be used for an absence resulting from a physical or mental illness, injury or medical condition, from obtaining a professional medical diagnosis or preventative care or from caring for a child, parent or spouse with a medical need.? Requires an employer to grant a verbal or written request for sick leave as long as the request includes the reason for the absence and expected duration of the leave.? An employer can only require an employee to provide certification from a health professional if the absence covers more than three consecutive workdays. ? Employers would not be allowed to eliminate or reduce existing leave policies to comply with provisions of the proposed law.